Andrew Murrison: A happy new year to you, Mr Speaker, and to all colleagues.
As at October 2023, 55.4% of civil servants are female—a rise of 0.7 percentage points compared with 1 October 2022—and 11.7% of the UK regular armed forces and 15.9% of Future Reserves 2020 are women, up by 1.2 percentage points and 1.4 percentage points respectively in the past five years. That means that the trend is in the right direction, but we can do better, and I am confident that we will do so across the defence enterprise.